Hackaday

Hackaday is a daily blog that features numerous articles focused on hardware and software hacks. A hack can mean altering an existing product or software, or inventing something new for purposes like convenience, creativity, or functionality. In addition to the blog, Hackaday operates a YouTube channel where they share project ideas and instructional videos.

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Vibing, AI Style

5 days ago | hackaday.com | Elliot Williams

This week, the hackerverse was full of “vibe coding”. If you’re not caught up on your AI buzzwords, this is the catchy name coined by [Andrej Karpathy] that refers to basically just YOLOing it with AI coding assistants. It’s the AI-fueled version of typing in what you want to StackOverflow and picking the top answers. Only, with the current state of LLMs, it’ll probably work after a while of iterating back and forth with the machine.
Vintage Game Rides Again Thanks To Modern Tech

6 days ago | hackaday.com | Dan Maloney

You have to admire the lengths designers went to back in the day to create engaging games and toys. One particularly clever game of this type was called GEE-WIZ, a horse racing game from the 1920s that seems like it might have been right at home at a bar or pub, and that caught [Michael Gardi]’s imagination enough that he built a modern version of the game. GEE-WIZ imitates a horse race with an extremely clever mechanism powered by a flywheel on a square shaft.
This Week In Security: No More CVEs, 4chan, And Recall Returns

6 days ago | hackaday.com | Jonathan Bennett

The sky is falling. Or more specifically, it was about to fall, according to the security community this week. The MITRE Corporation came within a hair’s breadth of running out of its contract to maintain the CVE database. And admittedly, it would be a bad thing if we suddenly lost updates to the central CVE database. What’s particularly interesting is how we knew about this possibility at all.
A Blacksmith Shows Us How To Choose An Anvil

6 days ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

No doubt many readers have at times wished to try their hand at blacksmithing, but it’s fair to say that acquiring an anvil represents quite the hurdle. For anyone not knowing where to turn there’s a video from [Black Bear Forge], in which he takes us through a range of budget options. He starts with a sledgehammer, the simplest anvil of all, which we would agree makes a very accessible means to do simple forge work.
Designing An FM Drum Synth From Scratch

1 week ago | hackaday.com | Dan Maloney

How it started: a simple repair job on a Roland drum machine. How it ended: a scratch-built FM drum synth module that’s completely analog, and completely cool. [Moritz Klein]’s journey down the analog drum machine rabbit hole started with a Roland TR-909, a hybrid drum machine from the mid-80s that combined sampled sounds with analog synthesis. The unit [Moritz] picked up was having trouble with the decay on the kick drum, so he spread out the gloriously detailed schematic and got to work.
An Absolute Zero Of A Project

1 week ago | hackaday.com | Dan Maloney

How would you go about determining absolute zero? Intuitively, it seems like you’d need some complicated physics setup with lasers and maybe some liquid helium. But as it turns out, all you need is some simple lab glassware and a heat gun. And a laser, of course. To be clear, the method that [Markus Bindhammer] describes in the video below is only an estimation of absolute zero via Charles’s Law, which describes how gases expand when heated.
GK STM32 MCU-Based Handheld Game System

1 week ago | hackaday.com | Maya Posch

These days even a lowly microcontroller can easily trade blows with – or surpass – desktop systems of yesteryear, so it is little wonder that DIY handheld gaming systems based around an MCU are more capable than ever. A case in point is the GK handheld gaming system by [John Cronin], which uses an MCU from relatively new and very capable STM32H7S7 series, specifically the 225-pin STM32H7S7L8 in TFBGA package with a single Cortex-M7 clocked at 600 MHz and a 2D NeoChrom GPU.
FLOSS Weekly Episode 829: This Machine Kills Vogons

1 week ago | hackaday.com | Jonathan Bennett

This week, Jonathan Bennett chats with Herbert Wolverson and Frantisek Borsik about LibreQOS, Bufferbloat, and Dave Taht’s legacy. How did Dave figure out that Bufferbloat was the problem? And how did LibreQOS change the world? Watch to find out!Dave’s blog: https://blog.cerowrt.orghttp://the-edge.taht.net/https://libreqos.iohttps://x.com/LibreQoShttps://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/And Dave’s speech, Uncle Bill’s Helicopter seems especially fitting.
Porting COBOL Code And The Trouble With Ditching Domain Specific Languages

1 week ago | hackaday.com | Maya Posch

Whenever the topic is raised in popular media about porting a codebase written in an ‘antiquated’ programming language like Fortran or COBOL, very few people tend to object to this notion. After all, what could be better than ditching decades of crusty old code in a language that only your grandparents can remember as being relevant? Surely a clean and fresh rewrite in a modern language like Java, Rust, Python, Zig, or NodeJS will fix all ailments and make future maintenance a snap?
Homemade VNA Delivers High-Frequency Performance On A Budget

1 week ago | hackaday.com | Dan Maloney

With vector network analyzers, the commercial offerings seem to come in two flavors: relatively inexpensive but limited capabilities, and full-featured but scary expensive. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground, especially if you want something that performs well in the microwave bands. Unless, of course, you build your own vector network analyzer (VNA). That’s whatÂ [Henrik Forsten] did, and we’ve got to say we’re even more impressed by the results than we were with his earlier effort.